Inside the Star

How Mavis Gallant avoided her own death in Paris

Listening to Mavis Gallant recount how a year ago she was lying on the floor unconscious for three nights but miraculously survived, I felt myself being swept into a richly detailed Gallant short story, filled with brilliant observations and lively characters.

Listening to Mavis Gallant recount how a year ago she was lying on the floor unconscious for three nights but miraculously survived, I felt myself being swept into a richly detailed Gallant short story, filled with brilliant observations and lively characters.

But this was not one of the compact gems of fiction that earned her an international reputation as a literary genius as well as a following among readers of The New Yorker and countless prizes, including the Governor General's Award in the country from which she exiled herself six decades ago.

Nor was it an extract from her wonderful new collection, Going Ashore, which brings together between hard covers some of her most neglected stories, having fallen into limbo after appearing in magazines long ago.

Happily, the stories have now been born again and they wear remarkably well. I was especially taken with those from Gallant's first decade as a published fiction writer, the 1950s, when she roamed around postwar Europe discovering displaced characters in transit while trying to make sense of the trauma that had shaken the world.

Even more happily, these stories are not being published posthumously. Gallant is alive and well and living in Paris, in the same tiny apartment she has called home since 1960. And at 86, despite some physical frailty, her mind is as inimitably sharp as ever, her face still beautiful and her talent for spinning a yarn undiminished.

Now she was applying her gifts not to a written piece of fiction but to an oral account of the literal truth concerning her near-death ordeal: cold facts with nothing invented, yet sparkling with so many fragments of insight, dialogue, irony and interpretation that the episode seemed already shaped into an oral masterpiece.

"I call it my accident because that's the term the hospital used," she explains. "The concierge in my building, a lovely Portuguese woman, was worried that I hadn't been picking up my mail, and on the fourth day I was found after she decided to send for a locksmith."

The concierge found the revered author crumpled on the floor like a rag doll.

"I felt someone with tears against my cheek," Gallant recalls. "She thought I was dead, but then I opened my eyes. Another few hours and my brain would have been mashed potatoes."

In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, for reasons she still does not understand, she had the delusion that she was in China, involuntarily detained.

After two months of institutional care, she returned home and picked up the threads of the Paris life she chose long ago, living alone and focusing on her dream of being a writer dependent on no one.

When we met for a long lunch a few months ago at one of her favourite Paris restaurants, Le Dôme in Montparnasse, I was apprehensive about how damaged she might be – but relieved to find her zest for life as invigorating and engaging as ever.

"The episode left no trace on the brain," she explained yesterday in a phone interview. "It wasn't a stroke. I woke up talking." Gradually teaching herself to walk, she made a dramatic recovery.

"What I had was a strong will to live," she notes. "I wanted to leave the geriatric hospital because it was full of old people and the only old person I like to have around is me."

I'd say what keeps Gallant charging ahead are the same drive and curiosity that prompted her in 1950, after The New Yorker accepted an early story called "Madeline's Birthday," to quit a perfectly good job as a leading Montreal journalist and move to Paris to pursue her dream of writing fiction full-time.

"I was young and idealistic, and when I first got to Europe I felt freed. I could go where I wanted. There were things I wanted to find out for myself. One was what happened in Germany. How was it that these people with such high culture did not stand up and say no to the most barbaric acts in history? So I travelled around, filling my notebooks."

That hunger for knowledge pays off in the rewarding detail of tales about displaced characters in such places as Salzburg, Austria; Tangiers, Morocco; and Menton, on the French Riviera.

A few years ago, Gallant told her long-time Canadian editor, Douglas Gibson, that she wished her lost stories could be revived in a book before she died. "I was joking, but he took me seriously," she says.

Now those lost stories have been found and her wish has come true.

The true beneficiaries are her devoted readers, who will find in these pages a deeply satisfying glimpse of just what Mavis Gallant was looking for when she left Canada 59 years ago.

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